Perhaps looking to avoid a similar situation at his team’s media event Friday, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski headed reporters off at the pass by firing a preemptive strike about the Blue Devils’ controversy du jour.

He made a short statement about the now-settled lawsuit involving former player Lance Thomas over some jewelry he bought on credit while still in college, then promptly ended discussion on the subject.

Here’s what he said, in its entirety:

“The thing that came up with Lance Thomas early in September when I was made aware that there was a lawsuit against Lance, I contacted our administration at Duke and they contacted the NCAA. Before anything was made public, they started working together to go through a process of seeing what happened.

Lance Thomas was a member of Duke's 2010 national championship team

“As a result of that, we want to honor the integrity of that process. That’s why I haven’t made any statements about it and will continue to do that. I hope you will understand that there’s an integrity involved in the process. We’re cooperating fully and I’m going to adhere to that.

“I have complete trust and confidence in all the parties involved, and I’m very proud of our compliance record over the 33 years we’ve been here.”

And yet, even if the incident involving Thomas ends up amounting to nothing, the mere fact that it happened is a chilling reminder to everyone in the program that no one in college athletics is immune from potential trouble.

Even Duke.

“It’s kind of shocking,” said senior center Mason Plumlee, a teammate of Thomas’ on the Blue Devils’ 2010 national championship team. “I mean, you come to the locker room every day and you hear about ‘Oh this is happened at Ohio State, this happened in football.’ You think you’re exempt from something because you’re at Duke, but you’re not.”

Thomas, a senior forward on the title team, bought $97, 800 worth of jewelry from a store in New York while the team was on winter break in December 2009.

According to the lawsuit brought by Raefello & Co., Thomas paid $30,000 down and signed an agreement to pay the rest within 15 days. Thomas defaulted on that promise, but has since settled the debt.

Though the NCAA is investigating the case to see if any rules were broken, neither Thomas – who is now with the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets – nor the jewelry store owners are obligated to cooperate.

“Again, we don’t know where he got the money from or what actually happened,” Plumlee said. “It’s not distracting.”